Since the beginning, there were Songbird nightlies available to test out new features and develop add-ons for future versions. There were both branch and trunk builds released each day – later they decided to only provide trunk builds. As of now they seem to build branch builds again for version 2.1.0.

Nightingale’s case is particular, we didn’t have build servers like POTI does when starting the project. Fortunately, we are now setting up buildbots to compile and upload nightly builds every day, if there are changes in the source code.

To begin with, three build servers are provided by Antoine (GeekShadow):

For now we are only building the sb-trunk-oldxul branch which is version 1.12 but matches Songbird trunk (2.2). We chose to rename to version to “1.12” mostly because there are no major changes between the Songbird trunk (2.2) and 1.11 since POTI is mostly bumping up the version numbers for their closed-source work.

Some technical notes :

Unlike Mozilla and POTI, we have decided not to use Buildbot since it’s much too complex for our needs. Instead, we are using our own bash scripts available on GitHub. They are easy to use and modify 🙂

Whether you’re a developer wanting to build the next generation of add-ons or a user not afraid of the freshest and sometimes very unstable changes, Grab a Nightly Build and let us know what you think!

A lot of interesting work has been done behind the scenes since the last blog post. Even though we’re still low on developers (are you a dev? we’re still searching!), ilikenwf and Mook made many steps in the direction of building with a more current, vanilla XULrunner. Non-technically speaking, that means making Nightingale much faster and more reliable, with more addons and support for newer web services. I (rjtdrjgfuzkfg) just finished working on the fix for the only blocker issue we had with 1.11.

We finally have working Windows builds using a recent version of taglib (read: builds without the annoying crash issue) and that means that the basic porting for using a newer, vanilla taglib is done. Now we need your support – please download the testing build and try it out to see if everything works as expected. A huge part of the metadata handling code was rewritten, so we need to test it thoroughly. Please report any issues and all the successes you run into in the forums or at the github issue tracker, so we can fix them in preparation for releasing the next version!

We will also be working on using system taglib support on Linux, which would reduce the number of bundled dependencies, making Nightingale even more lightweight. Linux builds of the current taglib changes are not yet available due to the required dependency rebuild, but they should be rolling out very soon!

Speaking of 1.11.1, we’re moving in the direction of releasing the second and probably last release from the current code branch. There are many bugs fixed already, and we’re looking forward to publishing them in a stable build soon. Again, we need your help testing, so make sure and let us know if you see something that is not ready yet or broken.